Friday, March 29, 2013

Collaborative Writing with Google Sites

My last post was about Google Sites, and since then I've had lots of great feedback from folks about the different ways to leverage sites with students.

Meanwhile, Karen Blumberg's idea of a book review site has continued to percolate. As it happens, a few weeks ago I serendipitously connected with a fellow 5th Grade English teacher here in the city, and we started emailing about potential collaborative writing projects for our students. As he and I discussed our curriculum looking for overlapping assignments or novels, he mentioned a book review project he does with his students every year. This seems like the perfect way to introduce a new project into my Writers' Workshop curriculum while also teaching digital citizenship and collaborative writing skills. We still have plenty of details to hammer out, but the basic concept of students sharing book reviews and commentary about novels via a Google Site seems like an exciting idea.

Curious to know if any others have tried something similar, or if there are other great ways to introduce a collaborative writing project? Please share your wisdom in the comments!

4 comments:

I've used Google Docs for collaborative script writing projects with my own class and it has always been successful. What I would love to do is script writing projects with classes further afield. Now, that would be awesome!

Interesting! Thank you for the reply! Do you mean scripts as in theater/plays, or scripts as in a computer code script? In either case, what kinds of scripts have your students produced and how many work in a group?

I know some classes here in NZ had a googledoc they shared and wrote a collaborative story together with 5-6 classes. It was great! Each class 'held' the story for a week and worked on their section then 'passed it on' to the next school/class. They developed a neat story together, each adding their own flavour about their towns and lives. It works really well. My class are currently working on a shared brainstorm for an adventure story and I find googledocs makes this so easy!

Thanks for your comment, Kimberley! I hadn't been considering the project in terms class-wide collaboration, but I like that idea very much. Rather than pair up my students 1:1 with students from the other school, we could pair up entire sections and work on a longer-form writing piece. Great idea!